Hello everyone!
You all here certainly love music. And you surely have some device to play it on. What are your best experiences with mp3 players? Which one do you use, if it has some significance for you?
Do you know the Disclosure by Michael Crichton? (also the film, I have just read the book) If you do, you’ll understand my relationship with technics. Sometimes these products works (or rather doesn’t work) like they’d go right off a conveyor belt in the factory of the Crichton’s story. I think, the technical parameters coming with each music player should include a promiles of alcohol in blood of a Malaysian tribesman who manufactured the device in a Malaysian factory for cheap electronics. Otherwise it is like I can’t enjoy a music until I perform a ritual of Sacred Reclamation and thus satisfy a bloodthirsty Malaysian demon, hidden in a music player, avenging it’s creator’s social situation.
I had a CD-MP3 player, Sony D-NE 511 for almost four years, and I have to say, it was a brilliant piece of technics. Costed 150$. It played almost every day, for several hours, at every temperature (-30 to +35 C), at harsh circumstances (sports, hard work, school) and lasted for 80 hours per two AA(? you know, these normal) batteries! It made my life hurt less. The belt bag is considered to be the least sexy piece of clothing, but I didn’t care, I carried it everywhere with me anyway. This player was like an eternal certainity, when about 10 headphones came and went to their retirement. It was almost like from a communism era, these old electronic devices are also unbelievably persistent, nowadays such a quality can’t be even bought for a reasonable price.
After the CD player stopped working, I tried some other devices borrowed from family supplies, but they were of low quality and half working.
On the Christmas I received a mp3 player as a gift - I had to return it to the shop just after, because the joypad had a major glitch and it lacked some important functions.
After I received my money back, I bought just yerstaday Hyundai MP 828 FM SPORT. While I’m writing this, Celtic Cross: Hicksville is playing. So far, it seems like a great choice. I picked it after a five minutes as a first thing in my sight, so probably a higher power led my steps, because it’s almost perfect. Costed 70 dollars, and it took all my cash, and still because of an “ecologic discard ing fee” I almost couldn’t pay it, but fortunately I found a 25 cent coin in my pocket, which saved the day. (all mentioned currency is converted to dollars as 1:20)
It looks just like a common memory stick with small 1 color display, the kind which is not fashionable in the age of tiny postmark-sized players or luxury big-displayed multimedia devices with 80 GB, like i-Pod. You can google up the design, anyway - you’ll see it’s quite repelling (I’ve even got that light blue-white, lol). It is also made of a very ordinary plastic, no fancy metal, rubber, or any smoother shiny plastic.
It has no joystick thingy on it, just buttons, so it is easy to control. What I’ve made sure of, is a good memory function, it remembers where exactly the song stopped (even if turned off and battery taken away), which for example, the Christmas player surprisingly didn’t have. It’s extremely important with several hours long psy-chill-ambient mixes, but somehow this technical parameter isn’t really mentioned anywhere in documentation. It also has a forward and rewind functions (a bit slow, I think, but nice anyway), FM radio, 2GB of memory, txt e-book reading mode (kinda cool, lol), phone number viewer, kind-of clock (not very reliable, but nice), a microphone - thus recording (meant for voice) in various qualities, various colourful display lighting, equalizer with some pre-sets, an option of encrypted memory part, and so on… The display is normal LCD, but well designed, thus there’s a lot of track and player statistics on small space. Just the track name scrolling should be a lot faster (people can read quickly), but that’s a problem of the most players. It supports my language, (besides English and Polish) and surprisingly well, the only letter it can’t display is ť (pronounciated as a soft T) but maybe with a firmware update it will. It comes with a small bag for it on an arm elastic band (must look cool while sporting), also it has quite a big holding loop (fits well on my thick leather lace pendant). Dunno about the battery usage, it much depends on a battery type, mAh, and so on.
What made me a bit displeased, it sometimes just switched off, not remembering the actual track position. I discussed it with salesman, he suggested updating the firmware, but so far, the problem seems to disappear when I replaced an 1-use battery with a rechargeable (and highly recharged) one. Or the Malaysian tech gremlin just got scared away. I hope he won’t be coming back any soon. Also, I don’t like the connection thingy - it is that tiny USB-ish female connector, covered by quite annoying rubber cover, and it must be connected to a computer by a special converting cable (like some cameras). I know the tiny female connector keeps the player shape small, aerodynamic and sporty, but I prefer a real big male USB. (“male” and “female” are here technical connector description therms, you’ve got the point). And a final major complain, it somehow doesn’t have a “hold” function.
Verdict: dunno, how soon the pieces will start fall of it, but this mp3 player has much more than I ever hoped for. I dare to hope there are some happy years together ahead of us. I will keep it with care like an eye in head, or even more, like a keys of my college room.
